Building an FAQs Chatbot

This chapter introduces Dialogflow, which is the cornerstone of creating voice-enabled applications. In order to demonstrate Dialogflow's functionalities, you will learn how to build a voice-enabled Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) chatbot. Dialogflow is a platform that processes the natural language spoken by a user and then converts it into intents so that a programming language, such as Node.js, Java, or C#, can understand it. In order to build voice-enabled applications for Google Home, Google Assistant, and Google Auto, Dialogflow will be used exclusively. In a similar way, later in this chapter, you will learn about Amazon's natural language processing platform, Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), in order to build a voice application for Amazon Echo products.

You will first learn how to set up a project in Dialogflow, then be familiarized with Dialogflow’s development environment, and will create an agent in Dialogflow. Then, you will learn how to program the FAQs chatbot’s conversations using Dialogflow’s intents, entities, context, and actions. This chapter will also teach you how to debug and test the chatbot's conversational flow in Dialogflow. Once the voice-enabled FAQs chatbot's conversations have been created using Dialogflow, the chatbot will be deployed to Google Assistant on Android and iOS. Finally, while testing the FAQs chatbot, developers will learn how to update a machine learning algorithm in Dialogflow, thereby improving the FAQs chatbot’s ability to understand conversations.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to Dialogflow
• Dialogflow development setup
• Dialogflow intents, entities, context, and actions
• Programming and debugging in Dialogflow
• Google Assistant on Android and iOS
• Machine learning and natural language processing in Dialogflow